Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class. In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris, as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends, set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx- -not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster, if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists; perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries in France, he has been the worst.

The Trade Unions are new things in industrial history. The guilds of the Middle Ages, with which the unions are often identified, were confederations of all engaged in the trade, masters as well as men, against outsiders. The Unions are confederations of the men against the masters. They are the offspring of an age of great capitalists, employing large bodies of hired workmen. The workmen, needy, and obliged to sell their labour without reserve, that they might eat bread, found themselves, in their isolation, very much at the mercy of their masters, and resorted to union as a source of strength. Capital, by collecting in the centres of manufacture masses of operatives who thus became conscious of their number and their force, gave birth to a power which now countervails its own. To talk of a war of labour against capital generally would, of course, be absurd. Capital is nothing but the means of undertaking any industrial or commercial enterprise, of setting up an Allan line of steamships or setting up a costermonger's cart. We might as well talk of a war of labour against water power.

Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present, without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big c, which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a working man standing alone, and without a breakfast for himself or his family, is not in a position to obtain the best terms from a rich employer, who can hold out as long as he likes or hire other labour on the spot. Whether Unionism has had much effect in producing a general rise of wages is very doubtful. Mr. Brassey's book, "Work and Wages," goes far to prove that it has not, and that while, on the one hand, the unionists have been in a fool's paradise, the masters, on the other, have been crying out before they were hurt. No doubt the general rise of wages is mainly and fundamentally due to natural causes: the accumulation of capital, the extension of commercial enterprise, and the opening up of new countries, which have greatly increased the competition for labour, and consequently, raised the price, while the nominal price of labour as well as of all other commodities has been raised by the influx of gold. What Unionism, as I think, has evidently effected, is the economical emancipation of the working man. It has rendered him independent instead of dependent, and, in some cases almost a serf, as he was before. It has placed him on an equal footing with his employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is not.

Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish, isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families, out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt, with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell; and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed. How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse. Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist, what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally, all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish, almsgiving and visiting have increased, good landlords have taken up cottage improvements. There have been harvest-homes, at which the young squires have danced with cottagers. But now Hodge has taken the matter into his own hands, and it seems not without effect. In a letter which I have seen, a squire says, "Here the people are all contented; we (the employers) have seen the necessity of raising their wages." Conservative journals begin to talk of measures for the compulsory improvement of cottages, for limiting ground game, giving tenant right to farmers, granting the franchise to rural householders. Yes, in consequence, partly, at least of this movement, the dwellings and the general conditions of the English peasantry will be improved, the game laws will be abolished; the farmers pressed upon from below, and in their turn pressing upon those above, will demand and obtain tenant right; and the country, as well as the city householders will be admitted to the franchise, which, under the elective system, is at once the only guarantee for justice to him and for his loyalty to the State. And when the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful, degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor- house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in hideous contrast with the palace. Suspicion and hatred will no more cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire: the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is astonished at this disturbance. He always thought the relation between the lord and the pauper peasant was the happiest possible; he cannot conceive what people mean by proposing a change. But then Lord Malmesbury was placed at rather a delusive point of view. If he knew the real state of Hodge's heart he would rejoice in the prospect of a change, not only for Hodge's sake, but, as he is no doubt a good man, for his own. England will be more religious, too, as well as happier and more harmonious, let the clergy be well assured of it. Social injustice especially when backed by the Church, is unfavourable to popular religion.

The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered, labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds, perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems, and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the winter or in the dark.

High wages, and the independence of the labourers, compel economy of labour. Economize labour, cries Lord Derby, the cool-headed mentor of the rich; we must give up our second under-butler. When the labourer is dependent, and his wages are low, the most precious of commodities, that commodity the husbanding of which is the chief condition of increased production, and of the growth of national wealth, is squandered with reckless prodigality. Thirty years the labourers of Egypt wrought by gangs of a hundred thousand at a time to build the great Pyramid which was to hold a despot's dust. Even now, when everybody is complaining of the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched materially even on the elegancies of life. Would it be very detrimental to real civilization if we were forced, by the dearness of labour, to give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking; for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen to bear the traces of human blood and tears. We are like the Merchant Brothers in Keats:—

"With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torch-lit mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quivered loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood."

"For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay pierced with darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."

Among other economies of labour, if this movement among the English peasantry succeeds and spreads to other countries, then will come an economy of soldiers' blood. Pauperism has been the grand recruiting serjeant. Hodge listed and went to be shot or scourged within an inch of his life for sixpence a day, because he was starving; but he will not leave five shillings for sixpence. Even in former days, the sailor, being somewhat better off than the peasant, could only be forced into the service by the press gang, a name the recollection of which ought to mitigate our strictures on the encroaching tendencies of the working class. There will be a strike, or a refusal of service equivalent to a strike in this direction also. It will be requisite to raise the soldier's pay; the maintenance of standing armies will become a costly indulgence. I have little faith in international champagne, or even in Geneva litigation as a universal antidote to war: war will cease or be limited to necessary occasions, when the burden of large standing armies becomes too great to be borne.

The strike of the English colliers again, though it causes great inconvenience, may have its good effect. It may be a strong indication that mining in England is getting very deep, and that the nation must exorcise a strict economy in the use of coal, the staple of its wealth and greatness. The lot of the colliers, grubbling all day underground and begrimed with dirt, is one of the hardest; the sacrifice of their lives by accidents is terribly large; and we may well believe that the community needs a lesson in favour of these underground toilers, which could be effectually taught only by some practical manifestation of their discontent.